This time of year I often find myself feeling guilty for buying a cut tree but it is such a strong tradition, I adore the smell of fresh pine (not scented candle pine) and it just looks so pretty. Even with this latest study saying real trees are greener than artificial ones, I still feel the guilt.

As a kid, my parents always bought live, potted trees for Christmas and afterwards, we would plant them in the backyard. Potted trees (at least the ones we got) always tended to be a bit on the Charlie Brown side of aesthetics and one year my twin brother and I pleaded and begged to go to a Christmas tree farm and get a "better" tree. We even got to cut it down ourselves!

Meanwhile, my mom's backyard still has some our old trees in it, and they have grown quite large — but no longer pruned and sculpted to look like a Christmas tree, they are barely recognizable. I wish we had labled them somehow. If my husband and I had a backyard I would definitely buy a potted tree.